The Visit
Photo and image by Nick M. W.
This story was originally published on WriterByNight (Jan. 31, 2023).A conversation with my dead friend, Bud.
Pretty sure that was a hypnagogic hallucination. How long had it been since we last saw each other?
“Three years,” he said.
“What?” Impossible. I was sure it hadn’t been that long.
“No, for real. It’s been three years. We were in Washington for Sam and Margie’s high school graduation."
Bud was right. Our siblings were in the same grade, and they graduated three years ago. “Oh, yeah! We threw that pool party for them at the Windbrooks.” I knew a kid in my math class who lived in that apartment complex. I hooked him up with fifty bucks, and he hooked us up with a spot to have a party.
“It was all good until that lady showed up.” My god. I’d forgotten until Bud mentioned her. I tried to drum up an image of this woman. She was a good 20 years older than us, and as my dad used to say, “she looked like she had been ridden hard and put away wet.”
“20 years?” Bud questioned my judgment. “Bro, she looked like she was in her sixties. At minimum, 63.”
“However old she was, she was tripping out about us being there,” I said. My mind lingered on the memory of that day, now coming back into my imagination. Crazy apartment lady asked us to turn our music off after about two hours of thumping jams. We obliged her, but that ended up not being enough. She came back to the pool and threatened to call the cops on us for making too much noise, which only got Bud all riled up, then and now.
“It was like two o’clock in the afternoon,” Bud said. He chuckled at something that he didn’t share. “I’m not proud of the way I acted towards that lady. She was a crazy bitch, but I said too much.” In fact, Bud had made her cry.
“What did you say to her?” I asked, knowing he wasn’t going to be specific.
Bud shrugged. “I made some joke about her dead son.”
Somehow, it’s the early evening, 6pm, and we’re kicking it in the living room of that one-bedroom spot I was renting in Trapville. I was sitting in the middle of my couch. Bud stretched out across the loveseat. Could have sworn I was in bed asleep, but no, we were there in my old apartment.
“Was it scary?” I asked Bud.
“What? Dating your mom?”
We laughed. The sound reverberated through decades of friendship. I composed myself and clarified. “No. Dying. Were you scared?”
Bud closed his eyes for a beat, took a deep breath, and exhaled. His eyes popped open. “I didn’t have a chance to think about it. I was there in the moment, alive, and then I was gone in a moment.” He considered what he was implying. “So, I guess it wasn’t scary at all.”
Bud was my best friend for 25 years, ever since we met in junior high. He was a skater. I was a skater. We skateboarded with the same crew and hit it off. That was another era, during the “way back when.” We were in our mid-20s when he came to visit me in that apartment after he graduated, after years abroad studying. “What did you study over there in Cambridge, Bud?”
“Business.”
Business. That’s right. You wanted to start a brewery. “And grow and distribute mushrooms to local grocers,” you added. “I’m talking about the healthy kind: Shiitake, Reishi, Enoki, Chanterelle, White Button, Porcini, Portobello, Lion’s Mane.”
Fascinating stuff. You come to visit me from the other side, and we’re talking about the business of mushrooms. Speaking of which, “Yo! I’ve got somewhere around an eighth of mushrooms in a shoebox in my closet. Want to split it and see where the adventure takes us?”
“Hell yeah.” Bud slapped me on the back with one of his ethereal hands. “This is why I love you, bro. I knew you would come through with some shit.”
The moon slid across the sky. My living room melted away to reveal the great outdoors. We’re sitting on two big ass rocks on top of Little Mountain. We ate the shrooms and decided that a hike was in order.
“My skin is buzzing, bro. I feel like an electrified fence.”
“Swear to God, dude, my eyes are humming.”
Bud had wandered off to piss, and I was supposed to wait for him at the rock, but I wanted to touch the sunrise, so I walked towards the horizon. Then a psychotropic wave of that psilocybin washed over me and passed. I regained a fleeting moment of sobriety. There was no sunrise. There were no big ass rocks. I wasn’t on top of Little Mountain. I wasn’t even outside. I was alone in the dark in my living room, on my couch, and Bud was gone.
